Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

1. This is the story of how the former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko contributed to the deadly Fukushima panic & unnecessary evacuation.

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1087713509373181952

2. The nuclear safety expert in charge of the U.S. government’s response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident says he was denied critical resources by the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Gregory Jaczko.

3. The expert, Charles Casto, makes his allegation in a new book, "Station Blackout: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Recovery."

amazon.com/Station-Blacko…

4. The publication of Casto’s book comes at the same time that Jaczko is on a nationwide speaking tour promoting his own book, "Confessions of A Rogue Nuclear Regulator," which I recently reviewed for The Washington Post.

washingtonpost.com/outlook/former…

5. Jaczko’s book is focused on rehabilitating his reputation.

In the fall of 2011, all four of his fellow commissioners criticized him before Congress alleging that after Fukushima, he “became increasingly irrational” and “sort of snapped.”

6. The NRC’s inspector general investigated and found 15 episodes of behavior that was “not supportive of an open and collaborative work environment,” including one instance when three female NRC staffers broke down crying after Jaczko berated them publicly.

7. In his book, Jaczko grants that he “sometimes behaved in a way that could be described as hotheaded” and that he had a “propensity to occasionally lose my cool” — but only because he cared so much about safety.

8. Casto’s book reveals how the former NRC chairman contributed to the deadly panic and unnecessary evacuation.

9. Five days after a tsunami triggered meltdowns at Fukushima, Jaczko told Congress that he and his NRC colleagues thought water had drained out of a pool where used fuel was being cooled, which would have made a bad situation much worse.

10. Casto says he was unaware that Jazcko was going to testify that the pool was empty. "I was stunned when I heard his statement," writes Casto. “I hadn’t even had a conversation about the condition of the spent-fuel pool with him.”

11. In Confessions Jaczko describes his testimony as “unfortunate,” but does not apologize. "I was just stating the facts as we understood them."

But, writes Casto, “It was not his job to make predictions or assess conditions that he didn’t really understand.”

12. Early in the crisis, Casto says he made an urgent request to Jaczko, by phone, for additional staff and other resources.

"His reaction was not positive. The number of staff requested struck Jaczko as beyond our mandate to provide consultation and advice....

13. "At one point in the conversation, the chairman said to me, 'Stop and take thirty seconds to take a breath.' That struck me as demeaning.

14. "It wasn’t as if I were panicking; I was using my decades of training, experience, and the experience for which I’d been hired to lead… The result of the call was clear. I would have to compromise."

15. Casto's testimony is troubling because he is the rare NRC official who Jaczko singles out for praise in his book:

"Chuck Casto, the lead NRC expert in Japan, was my most trusted advisor there...

16. "His efforts to gain the trust of everyone with whom he worked helped make this crisis much less difficult to resolve… He told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear."

17. Jaczko isn’t the only anti-nuclear advocate to praise Casto. The former director of nuclear safety for the anti-nuclear Union of Concerned Scientists told The Chicago Tribune that Casto was somebody who could be trusted.

18. "He's not a used-car salesman," David Lochbaum told the Tribune for 2012 profile of Casto. "He doesn't want to just ignore the bad.”

18. In his book, Casto describes how anti-nuclear propaganda made the Fukushima accident worse. “Anti-nuclear activists and contrarian nuclear experts (who lacked detailed information about the unfolding crisis) took to social media to speculate about the condition of the plant.”

19. “This ‘fake news’ fueled the panic and undermined our best efforts to calm the fears of embassy dependents and the public.”

As a result, far more people were harmed by the fear-mongering than by the trace quantities of radiation that escaped from the stricken plant.

20. Writes The Financial Times, "There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima... from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide; so far, there has not been a single case of cancer linked to radiation from the plant."

21. "That is prompting a shocking reassessment among some scholars: that the evacuation was an error. The human cost would have been far smaller had people stayed where they were, they argue."

22. “The government basically panicked,” Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, told The New York Times. “When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive.”

23. Radiation scientist Philip Thomas of the University of Bristol told the Financial Times, “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”

24. Since leaving government, Jaczko has started Wind Future LLC, a for-profit company that promotes itself as offering “the right mix of knowledge and experience to make wind energy a feasible and profitable renewable energy source.”

25. In his book, Jaczko sings his praises to the “ever-decreasing cost of renewable energy & natural gas” but never discusses their safety record.

Natural gas & wind energy, it turns out, have death tolls that are 22 times & nine times higher, respectively, than nuclear.

/END